Thanks for all the info.
My current solution appears to be loosely related to topic maps (in that
the links are defined externally to the things they link together), and
a superset of xlink *apart* from the range features of xpointer.
As there doesn't appear to be a 'standard' form of (extensible)
independent linking at the moment, I think its safe to continue down the
proprietary route for now.
cheers
andrew
> >What is the current status of Xlink?
>
> I wrote something at
> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/13/xlink.html two years ago
> about how little it had been used since becoming a
> Recommendation, and it hasn't been used much since, with one
> significant exception that Tony Coates pointed out when the
> article came out: XLink does play a significant role in XBRL,
> and XBRL is doing quite well.
>
> My theory about XLink's lack of success is the lack of
> evangelism. No one likes it enough to write up
> implementations and push it at the conferences. RDF and Topic
> Maps, which address many of the same issues that XLink was
> positioned as addressing, drew off many of XLink's proponents
> and no one seems to be left to push it as a solution to
> existing problems or as a way to implement new classes of
> applications.
>
> There are technical issues as well about XLink's strengths
> and weaknesses, but you can find plenty of discussions of
> those by searching xml-dev archives.
>
> I have been curious about Mozilla's evolving support, though.
>
> Bob
